Over-reacting to events in Iraq and Syria in the name of safeguarding national
security will guarantee neither justice nor peace

The Queen is in Northern Ireland. Where once such an encounter would have been unthinkable, now she greets Martin McGuinness, the deputy first minister and Sinn Fein leader, like an old friend. Their initial handshake two years ago was followed by a state banquet at Windsor Castle, during which Mr McGuinness toasted Her Majesty. This week, the British monarch and the man who once epitomised Republican armed struggle held their first private meeting.

In cauldrons of hatred across the world, peace comes dropping slow, if it drops at all. For all the progress wrought in Northern Ireland, the ghosts of war still surface. For as the Queen swapped small-talk with a politician once branded a prime threat to her nation, Belfast mourned a man whose life was blighted by the British state.

This Saturday, Gerry Conlon will be hymned to his rest at that city’s St Peter’s Cathedral. Mr Conlon, wrongly convicted for the IRA pub bombings in 1974, was a victim of one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in British history. I was at the Old Bailey on the day, in October 1989, when Lord Justice Lane quashed the convictions on the Guildford Four, in a 30-minute demolition of the “lies” told by Surrey police.

Mr Conlon hurled the pink carnation he was wearing into the crowds as he strode from court to grasp the freedom denied him for 15 years. But neither liberty nor a subsequent apology by the then prime minister, Tony Blair, could erase the damage. His father, Giuseppe, had died in prison for a crime he did not commit, his Aunt Annie had been wrongly jailed, and Mr Conlon struggled against drink, drugs and nervous breakdown before devoting the rest of his life to helping other victims of injustice.

Only his death, at 60, could mark the far boundary of captivity. In the words of Paul Hill, another of the Guildford Four: “Gerry is finally released.” His funeral should also be a lament for the excesses of which benign states and liberal societies are capable when panic runs high and the rule of law begins to fray.

We may be approaching just such a moment again. With the Middle East in turmoil, alarm is rising over the homegrown jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq to pose what one shadow minister is calling “an unprecedented threat to UK security”. The hydra-headed nature of fundamentalism makes the problem all the more intractable. Where young Britons have been fighting the Russian-inclined regime of President Assad for many months, their alignment with the al-Qaeda-inspired Isis (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) against a Western-backed Iraqi government has caused deep alarm.

That fear is compounded by Britain’s unspoken complicity in the meltdown of the Middle East. While Mr Blair is far from the sole impresario of the disaster unfurling in Iraq, warnings that his unlawful war would leave a vacuum in which jihadists could flourish have come true. Meanwhile, neo-cons who predicted that Iraqi citizens would greet US troops with flowers are regrouping, as convinced as ever that the West can bomb its way to democracy.

Back home, the security forces promise that tracking returning jihadists is their top priority. It seems doubtful, if not impossible, that such old-fashioned techniques will prevail against the slick methods of recruiting sergeants tapped into social media and a new world of techno-terror.

That leaves justice as the last bulwark against the enemies of the state. This week, Lord Carlile, the former reviewer of terrorism legislation, called on the Government to reintroduce “something like” the control orders scrapped after the Law Lords ruled, in 2009, that such measures breached the right to a fair trial. Labour, to its shame, appeared to back him, with not a thought for its own legacy.

Mr Blair and Gordon Brown tried successively (and unsuccessfully) to bring in 90- and 42-day pre-charge detention for terror suspects, heedless that the orders were both an affront to liberty and an obstacle to justice. No suspect under house arrest and deprived of all means of communication is ever going to provide the authorities with enough evidence to mount a trial.

It was left to this Home Secretary, Theresa May, to scrap the measure and to introduce the less restrictive Terror Prevention and Investigation Measures (TPIMs). While Lord Carlile may be right to say that 10 per cent of those who go on jihad return home interested in domestic terrorism, reviving unfair and oppressive laws is likely to create more martyrs than solutions.

The remedy, uncertain as it may be, lies surely in society, community and the past. The historian Joanna Bourke points out that blaming religion provides only a partial response to why educated, sports-mad boys from loving families opt for jihad. Answers may also lie in a culture that glamorises and glorifies war, not only through games such as Call of Duty but also (as Professor Bourke does not say) in the glittery-eyed evangelism of Mr Blair.

As Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police’s head of specialist operations, said this week, the horrors of Iraq and Syria are actually acting as a deterrent to extremism, with communities shifting their attitudes and a record number of people at risk of radicalisation being drawn into diversionary schemes.

Such straws in the wind of war will not mollify hawks for whom the answer lies in pugilism abroad and crackdown at home. The old Latin adage that justice must be done though the heavens fall invariably seems less attractive when the roof of civilisation appears to be caving in. Hence the recent and pernicious approval, only partly modulated by the Court of Appeal, for a terror case to be held in secret. When Mr Justice Donaldson sentenced the Guildford Four to life imprisonment in 1974, so heralding a dark age of British justice, at least he did so in open court.

Forty years on, as politicians dust off Magna Carta and commend the sanctity of “British values”, Islamophobia and casual suspicion of Muslims mirror the anti-Irish prejudices of the Seventies. As tensions heighten, we would be foolish to forget old outrages perpetrated in the name of justice. When I asked Carole Richardson, the only woman among the Guildford Four, about the novelties of freedom, she replied: “Seeing carpets on people’s stairs. And being able to wander round the shops.”

Although she had little criticism for a state that robbed her of half her life, the lessons should not be discarded as tensions rise. When Britain is under threat, the temptation is always to over-react. Hence the stains on British history ranging from miscarriages of justice to misbegotten foreign adventures, such as Iraq, to domestic remedies that merely exacerbate real and present dangers.

As the Queen makes a visit that would once have belonged in the realm of fantasy, and as Gerry Conlon goes to his grave, politicians are running scared and the rule of law looks fragile once again. It is time, as the tensions build, for Britons of all faiths and none to remind themselves that, from Birmingham to Baghdad, peace without justice cannot prevail for long.